ICANN announced today that it has begun the process of allocating the remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR). The activation of this procedure was triggered when Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre’s (LACNIC) supply of addresses dropped to below 8 million.

This move signals that the global supply of IPv4 addresses is reaching a critical level. As more and more devices come online, the demand for IP addresses rises, and IPv4 is incapable of supplying enough addresses to facilitate this expansion. ICANN encourages network operators around the globe to adopt IPv6, which allows for the rapid growth of the Internet.

“We are grateful for the guidance we’ve received from the RIR‘s as the number of unallocated IPv4 addresses dwindles,” said Elise Gerich, Vice President of IANA and Technical Operations at ICANN. “This redistribution of the small pool of IPv4 addresses held by us ensures that every region receives an equal number of addresses while we continue to work with the community to raise support for IPv6.”

“The IANAIPv4Recovered Address Space registry contained about 20 million IPv4 addresses earlier today and is now about half that size,” said Leo Vegoda, Operational Excellence Manager at ICANN. “Redistributing increasingly small blocks of IPv4 address space is not a sustainable way to grow the Internet. IPv6 deployment is a requirement for any network that needs to survive.”

IPv6 facilitates the exponential growth of the Internet by providing 340-undecillion unique addresses, compared to the 3.7 billion afforded by IPv4.

“To continue to fuel the economic growth and opportunity that is brought by the Internet, we are at the point where rapid adoption of IPv6 is a necessity to maintain that growth,” said Gerich.